Twitter’s move to simplify 140-character tweet rules

In the news this week Twitter is making a number of changes over the next few months to Tweets in a bid to “simplify” its product, allowing users to express themselves with more room in 140-character Tweets.

These changes are expected to be rolled out globally over the coming months, and will include:

• Media attachments, including photos and videos, will no longer count toward the character limit
• @names in replies to Tweets will be removed from the count
• People will now be able to re-tweet and quote tweet themselves, enabling them to resurface any of their previous Tweets and add new commentary
• Any new tweet beginning with an @name will be seen by all followers

According to the company, the simplified tweet rules will make conversations faster and more intuitive for people who come to Twitter everyday and to those who are new to the service.

“One of the biggest priorities for this year is to refine our product and make it simpler,” says Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO. “We’re focused on making Twitter a whole lot easier and faster. This is what Twitter is great at – what’s happening now, live conversation and the simplicity that we started the service with.”

It’s been almost a year since Dick Costolo announced he was stepping down as Twitter’s CEO, putting Jack Dorsey, the social network’s co-founder, in the top spot again—first on an interim basis, and then permanently.

However with these great ideas it doesn’t change the fact that user growth on Twitter has still remained painfully slow—in fact, the company actually reported negative growth in the quarter it debuted Moments – a tab which packaged tweets into collections users could follow. .

As a social media specialist these new updates seem like a great idea in my eyes. When managing my clients Twitter accounts I’m consistently trying to squeeze in the right message, the people I want to mention, hashtags and the image to go with the tweet to make it visually appealing.

I look forward to seeing the updates Jack!

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